On Tue, 2016-02-09 at 15:24 +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
I tend to agree with Peter when he says that people stick with older versions of software because they have a working setup and don't want to risk it breaking, and replacing vendor-provided system components with manually compiled upstream releases kinda goes in the opposite direction :) I would definitely never have risked anything like that in my previous life as a system administrator. For OpenStack, users are indeed updating core bits of the base OS to newer versions. It is also not neccessarily the users who are supplying the newer versions. For example, a vendor supplying software that extends RHEL, may choose to replace some bits of the core OS & support them. For example, Red Hat actually do this with their OpenStack product, where we have shipped newer versions of qemu + libvirt than were actually present in the base RHEL we deplkoyed openstack on. I know other OpenStack vendors do similarly, particularly with Ubuntu LTS releases there is an add-on cloud-archive repository providing newer versions of libvirt and QEMU.
I was not aware this was common practice, and I stand corrected. Still I'm left wondering what constraints could cause such a downstream vendor, whose software apparently requires very recent version of QEMU and libvirt in order to work, to base its product on eg. Ubuntu 12.04 instead of 14.04... Thank you for taking the time to engage in this discussion, it's been quite informative :) Cheers. -- Andrea Bolognani Software Engineer - Virtualization Team